The present invention relates to an electronic discussion system, and particularly to an electronic discussion system for exchanging information among a plurality of users through a network.
Heretofore, as an electronic discussion system using a network, there is a known electronic discussion system of the electronic bulletin board type, comprising a server machine including a function to accept requests for permission to present opinions (or messages) and a function to give permission to read opinions (or messages), and a client machine for accessing the server machine to perform opinion editing and writing processes. Information exchange in the electronic discussion system as described is achieved by storing information of all opinions in the server machine serving as a bulletin board.
As a system for sharing documents on the network, the "Reference System of Documents Scattered in the Network" revealed in JP-A-03-152641 is known by which a plurality of users refer to documents on the network.
In the electronic discussion system of the electronic bulletin board type according the prior art mentioned above, the server machine includes both the function to accept opinions (or messages) and the function to give permission to read opinions (or messages), for which reason, when many users participate in a discussion at the same point in time, the server machine is accessed concurrently by a number of client machines. Therefore, the processing load on the server machine is so heavy that the apparent processing performance of the system that is felt by the users trying to access it decreases greatly, which has been a problem.
In the prior art, the electronic discussion system is arranged such that, basically, only one server machine is used to record and manage all opinions (or messages) received, so that the load on the storage capacity in the server machine increases or decreases in proportion to the total amount of received opinion information. Another problem with the prior art is that as the total amount of received opinion information increases, the load on the storage capacity in the server machine increases. Accordingly, in a majority of the electronic discussion systems currently in use, this problem is avoided, as a rule, by limiting the kinds of opinion information to be recorded and managed to text data which imposes a relatively lesser load on the storage capacity.